Oxfordshire's star of musicals and recent Nancy voice coach lets us in on her life
Above: Claire with her composer husband Simon Hale.
On first meeting Claire Moore, you’re struck by her amazing blue eyes, perfect skin and ready smile. Her accent, with vestiges of Bolton still present, gives no indication of her extremely clear, fine soprano voice and she has a remarkably un-starry approach to life. She’s Ben and Anna’s mum first and a singer and actress second… at the moment. That’s not to say she’s put her musical career on hold, though. Living in Oxfordshire, with her husband, composer and musician Simon Hale, their children, dog and cats, is top of the priority list, but she’s very much in demand - recording for the BBC, playing Sally in Sondheim’s Follies, (The Stage magazine dubbed her “magnificent”) - creating musical productions for Anna’s school down the road – oh and she’s just back from New York where she performed at Carnegie Hall with Simon. It was a great success and they look set to collaborate again, provided she can find space in her 2008 diary to match his.
There are no obvious pictures of Claire in West End productions in the couple’s family home, not even on the loo wall; she makes no references to “when I was in Les Misérables/ Miss Saigon/ Phantom of the Opera/ Little Shop of Horrors/ Camelot/ The King and I…” and when I first approached her to ask for an interview her immediate reaction was one of surprise and delight.
Perhaps it’s her northern upbringing; perhaps it’s because she’s the daughter of a professional jazz pianist and saw ‘behaviour’ from so-called stars of the stage when she was a child; perhaps it’s because her mother would never have allowed her to get away with it… but there’s no side to Claire and what you see is definitely what you get.
Claire was enjoying a night out at the Roadhouse Café in Covent Garden with her friend Jeanette (the wig lady on Miss Saigon), having reduced her working hours to allow her have a social life after a particularly hectic spell, when she met Simon. He was deputising on the keyboards for the band that night. They had mutual friends but had never come across each other. Having tracked down her phone number, he appeared at her Clapham house-share doorstep clad in Lycra and still wearing his cycling helmet. Claire laughs that he looked a bit of a fright rather than a knight in shining armour, but they had so much in common, not least their love of music, and hit it off so readily, that they started a whirlwind romance that saw them engaged in July and married in October, with Ben born the following July.
Having children instilled a wish to swap their urban life for something a little more rural and Claire started perusing the property pages of Country Life to find something within easy reach of Manchester and Birmingham, where she is greatly in demand, yet still commutable to London, which is where Simon often works.
“We couldn’t afford anything advertised,” she says, remembering their increasing desire for tranquillity and domesticity. After driving in circles for 300 miles one weekend, they decided Oxfordshire was a logical location and suddenly their house, which is within cycling distance of Le Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons, was advertised. Though it was being used as a bed and breakfast business at the time, they could see it was ideal. There were no neighbours to complain about noise, it had outbuildings that Simon could convert into a recording studio, space to have an in-house music room, boasted a family kitchen and a sitting room overlooking the rolling Oxfordshire landscape and what’s more, there was a decent primary school nearby. Simon, Claire and the children settled in 1999, renting out their London property so they could secure the sale quickly and though work is still in progress on their sprawling farmhouse, it’s clear that this is a family home as well as a base for work. Conspicuously, there are musical instruments in every room – including seven keyboards in various forms – with more stashed elsewhere – as Simon assured me! The house has shoes and boots at both doors, and inside is a comfortable mix of antique and modern furniture, children’s paintings, glitzy Indian wall-hangings, school photographs, jazzy curtains, and the kitchen table is strewn with notes and letters from school, candles, and mini pumpkin sponge cakes. Clare teaches as well as sings and has thrown herself into local life – putting something back, as she describes it.
So what are her earliest musical memories? Funnily enough, they’re not of her father, the musician Geoff Moore, but of her grandmother, playing the piano, encouraging Claire and her sister to sing along.
“I always knew I wanted to sing. I had piano lessons… but I wanted singing lessons and my mum said, ‘oh - everyone can sing, you don’t need lessons’,” remembers Claire.
One of the music teachers at school, however, encouraged her and gave her the part of Mabel in the Pirates of Penzance - Claire trills in demonstration, sending herself up for having had no idea what was involved in the part before she took it on - it was this that finally persuaded Claire’s mother to relent.
Claire loved the performing and the dressing up involved in her role.
“I still do. You know, it’s much easier to be someone else rather than baring one’s musical soul,” she says, though she admits that part of the a thrill of working with Simon in Carnegie Hall recently (they flew the children over too, and turned the event into a family holiday) was because the performance involved just the two of them plus three New York musicians.
“We just had a wonderful time and it’s led on to some very nice potential things happening over there and we’re getting some of the tracks recorded properly,” she says.
Simon bursts in from the garden at this point, he’s been mowing the grass and thinking and Claire teases him about his hair because he’s been wearing a hat. We break while they chat, and Claire moves from the comfy sofa in the sitting room into the kitchen to make coffee.
“I knew I was never going to be an opera singer,” she says, offering me a home-made cake and washing up our coffee mugs. She later reveals that if she hadn’t gained her place at the Royal Northern College of Music she would have become a gemmologist – she had a Saturday job sorting precious stones and had been offered a full-time post by her employer, who was very supportive of all her musical activities.
Her singing teacher, Joseph Ward, encouraged her to learn all kinds of musical styles.
“In opera I felt too inhibited,” she says. She knew she couldn’t cope with the life, travelling the world, living out of suitcases and she felt strait-jacketed by operatic roles.
Her last year in college was punctuated with work (to the detriment of her finals, she feels, with hindsight) and she hit the attention of the public when she appeared in the Little Shop of Horrors and Joanna Lumley singled her out for praise in her newspaper column.
Claire went on to stand in for Sarah Brightman in Phantom of the Opera, taking over the role after six months to great critical acclaim (she was voted favourite Christine by the Phantom Appreciation Society). Her star rose and rose, and in 1989 she left the show to create the role of Ellen in Miss Saigon.
“I didn’t ever make a decision to do something, I just got carried along,” she says. “It was luck, and luck creates more luck.”
Of course, there had been years of living in shared digs and having no money, putting in the hard work and practice beforehand, and Claire’s very clear voice is a combination of this, a determination to succeed and blessed genes.
Chattering nineteen-to-the-dozen, Claire takes the coffee over to Simon’s studio, across the courtyard. After giving me a guided tour they talk shop and Simon shows Claire how to record the schoolchildren she’s about to whizz off and teach down the road.
As she’s gathering items together in preparation, she shows me some starry fabric she’s found for their costumes and natters about how, in the future, she’d like to do some more work with Simon.
He’s arranged, conducted and played keyboards on albums for Seal, Jamiroquai, Kylie Minogue, Blue, Emma Bunton, Mark Owen, Heather Small, Charlotte Church, Geri Halliwell, Will Young, New Order, Simply Red, Supergrass and many other well-known artists and groups.
He can also state that he’s worked with Claire, who seems happy juggling her performances with home life. With two musical children (Ben has wisely chosen to learn an instrument, the trumpet, that neither of his parents can play) there’s perfect harmony in their Oxfordshire home. And that, of course, is rarer than rubies and more precious than diamonds.